OUR TAKE AI or the real deal!

OUR TAKE

AI or the real deal!

Brisbane, February 1, 2024

Students, teachers, employees, or employers the world over are and have been in this dilemma whether one should use the AI or continue without it and stick to the real deal.

Technological advancement brings in many challenges and one of it currently is the use of AI. On one hand it is a boon when it comes to using AI for mechanics, and electronic development. But when it comes to human interactions and manipulations it could be a danger.

In the Literature sector many librarians are worried their job will become obsolete. As AI could take over the sorting, stacking, labeling, even writing books and articles.

In the cultural journey Australia has already succunbed to AI . The AI has reached the Kitchens churning out dishes at the spur of the moment. AI women have been appointed to work and work hard.

AI today has infiltrated in various sectors including the arts, media and the culinary art. Image manipulations with AI is at finger tips of the common man.

The manipulations of images with AI and one without AI sometimes is very difficult to recognize. The term ‘digital forgery’ means any intimate visual depiction of an identifiable individual created through the use of software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or any other computer-generated or technological means, including by adapting, modifying, manipulating, or altering an authentic visual depiction, to appear to a reasonable person to be indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction of the individual.

These days Adobe gives a vast range of generative AI tools which allows one to manipulate the bodies of ordinary people to look like celebrities. A recent case in Melbourne with Ms. Georgia Purcell, Victorian Animal Justice Party MP, when called on TV by Nine News showed an image of her where her white dress was swapped with a top exposing her midriff. This obviously upset her and she posted on X saying that in the image her breasts were enlarged and her dress was swapped. The Nine News in their defense said that the Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Expand tool has made her image accidently bigger. An automated action by the software. This tool allows the users to make the image bigger or fit in where the software makes assumptions of the proportions and generates an image that best fits and filled out with the new materials. If enough information is not fed into the system for the software to create the image it looks for the stock images to generate the current image. Most of the stock images are based on biases and images of commonly viewed materials.

Protection in such cases has thus become the top priority. Ms. Purcell does not buy the argument of Nine blaming it on adobe photoshop, however is ready to move on. Adobe on the other hand says that the edits to the images in question “should have required human intervention and approval” permissions often are generated by humans. This is how such images have often gone undebated and unaccounted for. In the past the AI-generated explicit images of Taylor Swift also created massive debate among the policy makers in US. The US lawmakers now have proposed a bill that would let victims sue over digitally faked sexual images. But how much would that help?

The Federal Government in Australia thus has introduced a plan to respond to this rapid rise of AI technology. In the near future hard rules may be imposed on these generative tools which have the potential for danger, discrimination and biases.

Article written by Amrita Deshpande (Associate Editor. MCCQ and New Media Artist)